EXTERIOR: A neo-classical building in Moscow’s old German quarter. A plaque on the wall reads, “Western District Military Court No 2”. A group of actors and journalists mill around on the lawn.
INTERIOR: A large hall with a grand staircase. Through the frame of a metal detector stands a statue of Lady Justice in her blindfold, holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other.
A commotion. Several portly guards in flak jackets, with a dog on a leash, escort two handcuffed women through the hall. One, about 5ft tall with big eyes and curly hair, is Yevgenia Berkovich, a 39-year-old poet and theatre director. She is dressed in a white shirt and black trouser-suit. The other, slightly taller, wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and large owlish glasses, is Svetlana Petriychuk, a 44-year-old playwright.
The two women are led into a courtroom and placed in a cage of bullet-proof glass. A bailiff lets in the spectators, who sit down on the upholstered, green benches. Berkovich mischievously sticks out her tongue as photographers’ cameras flash and click. Yuri Massin, the judge, looks towards Berkovich.
Massin: Are you ready for the proceedings?
Berkovich: Well, it depends on what will happen.
What happened was a show trial that revealed the radicalisation of the Russian state in the past few years. By the time proceedings began on May 20th 2024, Berkovich and Petriychuk had already been in detention for more than a year, having been charged with “propaganda and the justification of terrorism”. In the eyes of the regime, they had committed a crime by writing and staging a play called “Finist, the Bright Falcon”. Part docu-drama, part fable, “Finist” tells the story of the thousands of Russian women who, from 2015, were seduced online by professional recruiters from Islamic State (IS), and travelled to Syria to marry jihadists. Many of these women received lengthy sentences on their return home. The play premiered in 2020 to critical acclaim and was performed across the country.
As with any show trial, this one’s outcome was preordained, and its purpose was to justify the existing system and demarcate the ideological limits of the state. In doing so, it elucidated the ultra-conservative, anti-Western belief system that has expanded across public life since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Berkovich and Petriychuk were the first artists to be jailed since Soviet times for the content of their work—or, more precisely, the thoughts of their characters. But as theatrical professionals, they managed to turn the trial into their show.
The prosecution’s conduct was surprisingly inept. The main witnesses were ill-prepared and forgetful. Much of the testimony indicated that “Finist” offered a compelling repudiation of terrorism—not a justification for it. The courtroom performance seemed designed to show that the state was so dominant it need only go through the motions.
One thing was not in doubt: the prime target was Berkovich. There was disagreement at the highest levels of state over whether to prosecute her. The case was brought to the attention of Vladimir Putin himself and he gave the green light to proceed. (Petriychuk, the play’s author, was collateral damage.) But why her? Few people outside the theatre world had heard of Berkovich. Her productions were performed in fringe theatres. She was better known as a poet, but contemporary poetry is also a rarified calling.
Berkovich did not have the stature of writers, such as Boris Pasternak or Joseph Brodsky, who were persecuted by the Soviet regime. She was not a politician, unlike Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader, or a provocateur, unlike the members of Pussy Riot, a feminist punk group.
She regarded herself as a feminist, but she rejected any form of radicalism, artistic or political. And she did not wish to be a hero or a martyr. “I’m just a girl—I want to go home, I want prosecco, and a big, thick steak. Not to be on a banner!” she wrote to her friends after she was arrested, adding: “Don’t turn me into Joan of Arc!” But in the eyes of the Russian state, Berkovich was a heretic who undermined its most sacred myths.
Theatre has played an outsized role in Russian history, both as a tool of power and a place for free thinking. Alexander Herzen, a 19th-century liberal thinker, said that the theatre served instead of a parliament.
Russians treated productions as events both in their own lives and in the life of the nation. In 1920 in the midst of Russia’s civil war following the October revolution, Konstantin Stanislavsky, an actor and the inventor of modern theatre directing, genuinely believed that his staging of Byron’s “Cain” could stop the fratricide. Other directors, such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, harnessed revolutionary energies to smash the formality of the classical stage.
The Bolsheviks were quick to nationalise the theatres and impose their control. Culture became a vehicle for ideology—they ensured that any town of significance had a library, a concert hall and a theatre. In the 1930s they declared that all plays must conform to the tenets of “socialist realism”, in order to engineer new Soviet men and women. The avant-garde was banished. Meyerhold was tortured and killed.
What creativity remained before the second world war was all but extinguished during the last seven years of Stalin’s life—one of the darkest periods of Russian history. The optimism following the defeat of fascism gave way to ideological suffocation and resentment of the country’s erstwhile allies. Stalin launched a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans”—a codeword for Jews. In an editorial in Pravda, “cosmopolitan” theatre critics were charged with “an attempt to poison Soviet consciousness with a worldview hostile to Soviet society”.
The post-Stalinist thaw of the 1960s loosened the strictures of socialist realism. Sincerity and simple human emotions returned to the stage. Anatoly Smelyansky, the dramaturg of the Moscow Art Theatre, wrote that “the theatre took the place of both the sham parliament and the half-strangled church”. People went “not to be entertained, but to take communion. The theatre became virtually the only place where people could have free, live contact with one another.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union released theatre from censorship, but it also stripped it of its utopian mission. In the 1990s theatres continued to be subsidised by the state but many hosted casinos or foreign-currency exchanges on their premises to make money. The best theatre directors staged classics, but commercial productions of little artistic value dominated. Almost no modern plays of note were performed.
In the 2000s, just as Berkovich began to learn her craft, a new generation of directors and playwrights arrived on the scene. At times, they used video and art installations, and staged plays based on verbatim transcripts that re-enacted true events. Often these took the form of trials, real or imaginary—a noteworthy example was a play that staged the trial of those responsible for the death in custody of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who exposed corruption. Theatre once again became politically charged.
Yevgenia Berkovich, known as Zhenya, was born on April 29th 1985 into the Leningrad intelligentsia. “My family consists of journalists, human-rights defenders, writers, teachers and dissidents,” she told an interviewer. Her grandmother, Nina Katerli, was a dissident writer, who played a large part in Berkovich’s upbringing. She gave her Soviet romance and adventure novels to read, which extolled friendship, justice and duty. “I am made up of this,” Berkovich said. She was also made up of the sensibility of her Jewish grandfathers. The historic memory of being part of a discriminated minority stayed with her. “Not exactly the main part, but inescapable…It’s a specific Soviet Jewishness.”
Like many artists of her generation, Berkovich resented the secrecy which she considered part of the Soviet legacy. She believed in transparency and sincerity. She posted on Facebook about everything from politics to the drinking problem that she managed to overcome—and her poetic reflections on the times. Her theatre was shaped by her poetry and together they made an art form suited to public discussion of the most important matters.
From the age of 11 she wanted to be a director “to compensate for being an ugly girl with a fiery temper”. In 2008 she arrived in Moscow ready to learn her craft. At the time, the city was flourishing. “Modernisation” was the slogan of the day, touted by Dmitry Medvedev, the new president. Moscow imagined itself a European capital on a par with Berlin and Paris, with fashionable bars and loft conversions and performance art. One of the main beneficiaries of this cultural openness was Kirill Serebrennikov, a rebellious theatre director who was in vogue with both the elite and young liberals. Berkovich became his favourite student.
“She had a heightened sense of empathy,” Serebrennikov recalled. As a student she came up with an idea of atoning for one’s failures, such as getting drunk or failing a test, by volunteering in a hospice. This spirit of social action had spread across Moscow at the same time as the city got glitzier. Charities, shelters and environmental projects sprang up. They were supported by young, socially mobile artists, journalists and professionals who wanted to make the country warmer and more humane. The Kremlin didn’t mind these non-political volunteers who took care of problems it had no interest in.
The cohabitation between the liberal intelligentsia and the state ended in 2012, when mass protests erupted as Putin returned to the presidency. But Berkovich’s rift with the regime was not along cultural or even political lines, but ethical ones. That year, following Magnitsky’s death, America imposed visa bans and asset freezes on Russian officials who violated human rights. Putin retaliated by banning the adoption of Russian children by American couples. Some of these children had already met their adoptive parents and were denied a chance of a better life. The measure was dubbed “Herod’s law”. “This was my watershed moment,” Berkovich told an interviewer. “In life, in work…everything is quite closely connected.”“It was supposed to be temporary, then temporary, again”…until it was not.
Berkovich staged plays in Serebrennikov’s trendy theatre. She also ran workshops with teenagers in orphanages. She and her colleagues did not want simply to be “volunteers with cakes”, so they set up a camp where they and the children lived together for weeks, and organised a festival. As a result several children gained foster parents.
Berkovich did not intend to become one of them—at least not yet. She was enjoying her career and her independence. She drank and partied. She was ambitious too, rehearsing in her mind her Oscars acceptance speech. Then she received a call. The foster mother of two of the girls she was close to had been diagnosed with cancer. This meant the girls would have to go back to a state institution unless someone took over the guardianship. She took them in.
In 2018 Berkovich, with a group of female actors, founded an independent company. “Being independent has nothing to do with any ideology. It simply means it is private—not dependent on state funding.” It was private in another way, too. Her productions were staged in intimate spaces. The characters in her plays—children, women, elderly people—were at home in the domestic sphere, even when they found themselves caught up in conflicts waged by men possessed by dogma. Her theatre became a sanctuary. She sought to reveal humans in all their fallibility. She had the word “fragile” tattooed on her left wrist next to the image of a fractured glass.
The theme of life shattered by war ran through her production of “Finist”. Berkovich wanted to understand what drove thousands of women into the arms of a totalitarian sect. The title of the play comes from a folk tale. Maryushka, a merchant’s youngest daughter, goes on a quest in search of her falcon-prince. Aided by witches and forest animals she overcomes obstacles and eventually finds him. The play is a modern retelling set in a courtroom, where the women—all of whom are called Maryushka—explain to the judge how they fell into the arms of IS. Berkovich’s production moves freely through the metaphysical landscape of a fairy tale, as well as incorporating song, stand-up and documentary material.
“On the appointed day”, one of the Maryushkas says, “I got a message with my airline ticket attached, and they told me to go. I texted my mother I was going to the campus and put an extra skirt in my bag. Together with some lacy lingerie from Intimissimi. I bought it for a special occasion. And off I went in search of my Finist, the Bright Falcon.”
The play deals humorously and compassionately with the tragic predicament of the women who fled their depressing lives and callous partners for a promise of love that turned out to be criminal. It does not justify or condemn them but was—as Nikolay Pesochinsky, a jury member of the Golden Mask, Russia’s main theatre award, said—a moving and prescient warning against the draw of terrorist cults. “Finist” won the awards for best play and best costumes.
But the celebrations were muted. Three months earlier, Putin had invaded Ukraine. Serebrennikov, Berkovich’s mentor, left the country. Berkovich stayed. “Finist” continued to be performed. And Russia was falling into the grip of its own death cult.
The police came for Berkovich in the early hours of May 4th 2023. She was taken away as she was trying to soothe one of her teenage children who was having a tantrum, and stop the other one from throwing herself out of the window. But the process that led to her arrest had begun six months earlier.
On October 11th 2022 “Finist” was supposed to be performed at a theatre festival in Nizhny Novgorod, a city 250 miles east of Moscow. On the eve of the performance an actor and director called Vladimir Karpuk wrote a denouncement on VK, Russia’s largest social-media platform. He connected the production to a Ukrainian attack that took place on Putin’s birthday, a few days earlier, on the Kerch bridge, which links occupied Crimea to the Russian mainland. Karpuk compared Berkovich to the saboteurs.
The post was larded with phrases from the late 1940s such as “pustules of the fifth column”. It called on the authorities to cancel the performance in Nizhny Novgorod and deal with the “cultural saboteurs”. Karpuk also attached highly personal photographs of Berkovich that had been stolen from her phone and leaked on a sleazy Telegram channel, which showed, according to him, “rabid propaganda of militant feminism, unconventional relationships, unconcealed sympathy for Ukraine and hatred for the current government”. Karpuk used language from the criminal code with which Berkovich would later be charged. “All we need is propaganda and the justification of terrorism!…Coincidence?”
Karpuk was not a stereotypical Stalinist. He posted online photos of himself in swimming trunks to advertise his theatre course, claiming he could “boost creative libido” with “Kama Sutra poses”. It is unclear whether he denounced Berkovich on his own initiative or was put up to it. But informants of his type have been emboldened since the beginning of the war.
The authorities needed more substantive evidence than a single post on social media. So they commissioned an analysis of “Finist” from a man who advertised himself as an expert in a “discipline” called destructology. Roman Silantyev, a shaven-headed, bull-necked man in his mid-40s, began his career as an expert on Russia’s Muslims and was a vituperative critic of radical Islam. He became a member of World Russian People’s Council—a right-wing project headed by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church. It was politically extreme even by the church’s standards. The council had been one of the main advocates for the incursion into eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, and hailed Putin’s full-scale invasion as a “holy war” against Western satanism.
In 2018 Silantyev announced the invention of an “applied science” he named “destructology”, which he regarded as a prophylactic against ideas that came from the West and threatened to destroy Russia’s security and identity. These ranged from wellness culture and new-age spirituality to feminism and LGBT rights to Islamist terrorism. Destructology purported to show how seemingly incompatible alien ideologies are able to work in concert with each other against the values of Russian civilisation.
Silantyev likened himself to a therapist in the field of “spiritual security”, whose job was to diagnose dangerous ideas. There was an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in his approach. He gave courses to operatives of the FSB, Russia’s security service, on destructology and provided expert opinion in cases it initiated.
On the eve of Berkovich’s arrest, he filed a report on “Finist, the Bright Falcon”. The play, he said, simultaneously managed to promote radical feminism and radical Islamism. “Decolonisation of women’s feminism may be directed into a destructological course,” he wrote. This may sound absurd, but that was the whole point.
Stalin’s show trials were grandiose affairs, staged in the vast ceremonial hall of the House of the Union and illuminated by bright lights so they could be filmed and broadcast in cinemas around the country. The main role was played by the accused, who would abjectly confess their crimes—usually after torture or threats to family members—in the hope that the performance would save their lives. Putin’s trials are not a spectator sport but they also make a mockery of logic and argument, to demonstrate that the state has power over objective reality.
On the first day of Berkovich’s and Petriychuk’s trial, Ekaterina Denisova, the young, suntanned state prosecutor, read out the indictment at a rapid clip. It was almost comically slapdash. “At a time not precisely established by the investigation…at a place not established by the investigation, Yevgenia Berkovich, holding ideological beliefs related to the justification and promotion of terrorism…read the text of the theatrical play ‘Finist, the Bright Falcon’.” Certain words were repeated like a refrain: “Islam”, “terrorists”, “crime”, “knowingly”, “extremist”.
Massin: “Do you understand the charge?”
Berkovich: “I don’t understand the question about whether I understand the charge. The meaning of the words is clear. I know Russian perfectly well. It is completely unclear what this set of words has to do with me…I have never shared any form of Islam, either radical, nor any other…I have never worn a hijab. I am in a secular marriage to a non-religious man. I eat pork, I take pictures on the beach…I never published or disseminated anything. I staged the performance with the aim of preventing terrorism…I consider this indictment illegal.
Denisova proceeded to list her evidence. This included documents related to the defendant’s property, her marriage, her car (“none”), the physical dimensions of her phone and her computer, and screenshots of a playbill.
“What does any of it have to do with the case?” the defence counsel wondered aloud. “The prosecutor has not read the play. Not a word of it has been cited,” she insisted.
“The prosecution does not find it necessary to examine the material evidence,” Denisova replied. Astonishingly, for the duration of the trial the judge refused to read the play or watch a recording of the performance that was the subject of the case.
Karpuk, the actor who denounced Berkovich, gave evidence. He wore an electric-blue jacket and white jeans, and seemed ill-prepared. He was unable to describe the play or even explain how he got a ticket. It was clear that he had never seen a performance, though he condemned it as “destructive and destabilising”, waving his hand demonstratively. It was also apparent that his main issue with the play was that the Russian women prefer Middle Eastern men to Slavic ones. “What is it saying—that Russian guys are bad, right?…We still have a state, thank God, of traditional values…We have a man at the head. It’s just the way it is.” According to those in court, the judge cringed at his performance.
Berkovich had an advantage that many defendants lacked. She knew how to command the stage. Despite being locked in the dock, she retained not only her sanity and mischief, but her vocation as a director. “After each hearing we had this feeling as though we had taken a breath of incredible freedom, because despite sitting inside that cage, Zhenya, as a director, seemed in charge of the space and the space obeyed her,” said Yevgeny Gindilis, a documentary film producer, who attended the trial.
Since the prosecution refused to admit the play as evidence, the defence brought it into the court. The actresses who played the Maryushkas were put on the stand. One of them, Yulia Vitkovskaya, read a monologue from “Finist” about how her character ended up in Syria. “I never imagined war, those hardships, fear. All the bloodshed. All the bombings. All the videos ISIS publish about a perfect life…It’s all aimed at people in Russia.”
From the dock, Berkovich assumed the role of director, using the right of the defendant to cross-examine witnesses.
Berkovich: Who are you talking to at that moment?
Vitkovskaya: I am talking to the judge.
Massin seemed engrossed—and the prosecution was making a hash of the case. At the last minute, Denisova introduced a trump card: a secret witness who appeared by video link. “Every contemporary play must have a video installation,” one of the actresses quipped. Berkovich’s defence protested: the secret witness had not been mentioned in the indictment. No convincing reason was given as to why his identity had to be concealed. The defence presumed that he was an FSB operative. He was placed in a separate room, his voice electronically altered and his face obscured. Massin went to verify his identity and dubbed him Nikita. Whatever he saw or was told made him curt and intemperate. There were no more displays of interest in the art of theatre.
The witness began to give evidence. All anyone could hear were snippets of speech against a roar of static. A murmur spread through the court.
Massin, snappily: If anyone present starts to protest, sigh or groan, I will remove them.
Karpinskaya, the defence lawyer: I cannot conduct a defence in this case because I do not hear what this witness is saying.
Massin: This is your subjective perception of what is happening.
Berkovich: Your Honour, we have a similar subjective perception.
The sound cleared up slightly, the reasons for concealing Nikita’s identity did not. One moment he said he was concerned about his physical safety. The next, he was worried about his reputation and career.
He claimed to work in theatre and to have heard the play at the public reading in 2019. At the time, he had “conflicted” feelings but said nothing. “There was a risk I would look like a fool,” he said. He went to see the performance in December 2022 and recorded it on his phone “to show a friend”, but it took him four months to feel a bout of “civic responsibility” and walk into the police headquarters in Moscow to report a crime.
Like Karpuk, Nikita could not remember much about the production itself. But he delivered his complaint succinctly. The women were “terrorists” but “portrayed as victims, and the blame is placed on the Russian state”. Marriage to members of IS is “a positive example of a happy relationship”. Berkovich suggested this was a gross misinterpretation.
Berkovich: Witness Nikita, tell me, do you recall in the play a woman in Syria being sexually assaulted. Is that told in the play?
Nikita: I don’t remember, to be honest. We’ve been with you for how long? Two hours? My head is spinning. I’m having trouble remembering right now.
Nikita was the last of the prosecution witnesses to be questioned in open court. After his shambolic performance, Denisova asked for proceedings to be conducted behind closed doors. Massin agreed—not because the court had anything to conceal, but because it had nothing else to show.
On July 8th 2024 journalists and supporters of Berkovich were allowed back into the courtroom to hear the verdict. Massin found Berkovich and Petriychuk guilty of “inciting hostility and hatred towards the authorities through the dissemination of ideologies that deny the Russian state system and the Russian social order”. He relied almost entirely on Silantyev’s report, even though the defence lawyers had managed to obtain a letter from the ministry of justice which declared that destructology “does not draw on any scientific or practical data and therefore cannot be verified and therefore could not be admitted as evidence”. Massin gave Berkovich and Petriychuk each a six-year sentence, as the prosecution requested. It was a triumph of ideology over reason.
The question of whether Putin’s regime is ideological or opportunistic has been circulating for years. Few people in Russia or the West described Putin during the 2000s as an ideologue; most considered the government to be a cynical kleptocracy.
The mounting number of bodies following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine made an ideological grounding for Russian society more urgent than ever. On November 9th 2022 Putin signed his first purely ideological document—an executive order directed at strengthening “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values”. It rejected “destructive ideology”, such as a “fostering of egoism, permissiveness and immorality, rejection of the ideals of patriotism, service to the Fatherland…and the values of a strong family”. Unlike the ideologies of the 20th century, Putin’s ersatz version offers no vision of the future and cannot mobilise masses. It may not be convincing, but it is effective at determining who has a place in the system.
In April 2025 Alexander Kharichev, Putin’s ideologist who monitors social trends in the presidential administration, published a manifesto that described Russia not as a country or a nation, but as a unique state-civilisation, unconstrained by any borders. According to Kharichev, Russia opposes Western individualism, decadence and “the cult of consumerism” with the idea of sacrificial devotion. “Spiritual values matter more than material comforts,” he wrote.
In heavily ideological times, culture becomes a matter of import to the state, and theatre, once again, a target. As Putin said in a recent meeting with artists and writers, Russia does not only have an army and navy to project power but “many forms of art”. Culture transmits the “civilisational code”—so it had to be cleansed of people like Berkovich. She was dangerous not because she was an ideological opponent of the regime, but because she denied the supremacy of ideology as such.
In the eyes of the state, Berkovich’s humanism was deviant. She embraced weakness and fragility in a world where rulers cultivate violence. Most important of all, she represented ordinary life and recognisable emotions. When violence becomes the norm, the display of normality is a crime. At her trial Berkovich addressed the essence of the case against her. What she regarded as “compassion, empathy, mercy”, the prosecution judged to be “propaganda or justification of terrorism”.
“Have I personally felt compassion for the heroines of the play and their prototypes? Mostly yes. Compassion for those who have fallen, and mercy towards people with broken lives, even those partially or fully responsible—this is one of our main traditional values. At least, that’s how Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin understood it…It’s impossible to judge or imprison someone for showing compassion. First, it contradicts the law; secondly, it destroys not only individual lives but society itself.”
Berkovich stayed in Russia not because she was fearless. When The Economist asked her to appear on a podcast in December 2022, she said, “Let’s be honest: after every post with poems or interviews, I wake up in the middle of the night because I think the police are breaking in, and I need to get the children dressed quickly and gather the cats. And I’ve had my bag packed for a long time now. I appear so brave and cheerful on the outside, but in reality I am grey-haired and stutter a little.”
She did have an elderly grandmother to look after as well as her daughters. But, as she told an interviewer at the same time, “The truth is that if I really wanted to leave, I would have found a way to deal with those reasons.”
Instead she remained because she felt it was necessary. “In all these months, I’ve never articulated why I’m still here. I think I’m needed here,” she said in the interview. “I don’t exaggerate my importance. But someone has to be here. After all in 20, 40, 60 years we will have to speak to the world and someone needs to be here to be able to say, ‘We’ve been with you.’” In her head, she no longer composed an Oscars speech but her “last words in court”.
But she did not want to go to prison; she simply wanted to live in her own home without being a hero. Her friends tried to persuade her to flee. One of them was Chulpan Khamatova, a well-known Russian actress who has lived in Latvia since the war began. “Berkovich almost got angry. She told me that we [who have left] don’t understand what it is like there.”
The feeling that Putin’s war against Ukraine was a catastrophe for Russia was near universal in Berkovich’s circle. People who remained found it hard to breathe, let alone speak. In the first weeks and months of the war, many of her friends fell silent not because they were afraid—one could talk safely in private—but because they did not have the words to express their experience.
Against the advice of her friends, Berkovich continued to publish her poetry on Facebook, the main forum of discussion among the intelligentsia. Her poems provided oxygen for those who were gasping for words. “Suddenly we could breathe,” said Khamatova.
One of her poems in particular hit a nerve. It was published on May 11th 2022. Two days earlier, the Kremlin had staged its annual military parade to mark the Soviet victory in the second world war, the commemoration of which Putin had turned into a cult. The poem was in the form of a dialogue between the ghost of a dead veteran of the Great Patriotic war, as it’s known, and his grandson.
Grandpa sat down on the Ikea stool, so that his broad back would block
The view from the window. He said: Seryozha, we need to talk.
Can you please, my dearest grandson, whom I adore,
Not post anything about me on Facebook, never, no more?
Not in any context, whether with or without the letter “zed” or the letter “zee”.
Just don’t do it, says grandpa. Don’t post anything about me.
Don’t claim any victory in my name
No victory.
[…]
We’ve lived our one and only life.
It was hard. Now, I implore:
Can we please stop serving you
As poster boys for war?
We’re done here, kids.
We’ve gone down into the ground.
The poem went viral. It was set to music and actors read it out on YouTube. It may also have sealed Berkovich’s fate. Two sources told me that it was brought to the attention of Alexander Bastrykin, the country’s most senior policeman. The prosecutor could have indicted Berkovich for her poetry, but that might have turned her into a martyr. Instead, they decided to brand her a terrorist.
Berkovich staged her last production in late December 2022—a particularly dark time in Russia. It was a modern nativity play that moved between Bethlehem and contemporary Moscow. In it she included another one of her poems: a meditation on the birth of Christ that rejected the idea of sacrifice. It read, “Every boy you’re serving as cannon fodder/Once used to be a tiny, soft, little son.”
In her book, “Men in Dark Times”, Hannah Arendt wrote that, “Even in the darkest of times…illumination may come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time-span that was given them on Earth.”
She might have been writing about Berkovich. “I see nothing more important right now than reminding myself and everyone around of the value and fragility of human life,” she wrote in the introduction to the nativity play. “Not in a metaphysical sense, but in the most horrifyingly real way. There was a person, then suddenly—Herod made some decision—and the person is gone.”
Yevgenia Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk are currently being held in a penal colony, where their work assignment is sewing clothes. Berkovich is forbidden from making theatre but continues to write poetry.
Source: Arkady Ostrovsky, “The Kremlin put her on trial. She stole the show,” The Economist, 9 October 2025. Poem translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya. A yearly subscription to The Economist costs a pretty penny, so you will understand why I thought it a public service to depaywall this excellent article and share it with you here. ||| TRR
